Plane Search Raises Questions About Sea of Floating Junk

By Colleen Curry
The search area for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been shifted nearly 700 miles northeast, March 28, 2014. (Australian Maritime Safety Authority)
The search for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 has not turned up any evidence of a crash, but it has trained the world’s gaze on thousands of pieces of junk floating on the ocean’s surface.
Much of that debris could be made up of plastics, old appliances or parts of homes that have washed away from fragile communities, and cargo containers from ships, according to ocean advocacy group One World One Ocean.
Check out some ...

As geochemist James Lawrence Powell continues to prove, the only people still debating whether or not climate change is “real,” and caused by human activity, are the ones who aren’t doing the actual research. In an update to his ongoing project of reviewing the literature on global warming, Powell went through every scientific study published in a peer-review journal during the calendar year 2013, finding 10,885 in total (more on his methodology here). Of those, a mere two rejected anthropogenic global warming. The consensus, as he defines it, looks like this:
Powell even had to expand that itty bitty slice of ...

How Global Warming Is Dissolving Sea Life (And What We Can Do About It)

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The last time Earth's oceans were this acidic, a six mile-wide sulphur-rich space rock had just smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, unleashing a deluge of acid rain that exterminated all sea life in the the top 400 meters of the water column. Now, some 65 million years after the Cretaceous extinction, human activity is threatening to similarly decimate the ocean's ecosystem—this time, from the bottom up.
How the Oceans Went Out of Whack
Under natural conditions, carbon dioxide is continuously transferred between the ocean, atmosphere, and continents in a delicately balanced process known as the carbon cycle. CO2 is pulled from the ...

Global warming documentary Chasing Ice to show at Princeton film festival

Houses swept away by floodwaters; record drought, wildfire and hurricanes; melting ice caps and the hottest summer on record – how can anyone doubt global warming?
Photographer James Balog, once a skeptic, sets out to prove it through his Extreme Ice Survey, capturing photographic evidence of melting, disappearing glaciers. Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski documents the lengths to which Balog goes to prove his point – including kicking off his boots to plunge into the icy water for one chilling shot in Chasing Ice.
Despite a bum knee, Balog hikes ice caps in Alaska, Iceland and Greenland, placing specially developed cameras that will endure ...

Deep sea expedition reveals Mediterranean secrets

During most of August, Ballard's research team on board the EV Nautilus have concentrated on the unique geological makeup of the Eratosthenes Seamount, one of the largest features on the eastern Mediterranean seafloor.
Ballard shot to fame after 'discovering' the Titanic in 1985
“We have found a lot of fascinating things," Ballard told DW, on board the Nautilus. "You have to realize that when you go where no one has gone before on planet earth, you are not really sure what you're going to find.”
“We've been making some real biological discoveries, and we've also been mapping two Ottoman war galleys which sank ...

Pollution Playing A Major Role In Sea Temperatures

The Atlantic Ocean, especially the North Atlantic, is peculiar: Every few decades, the average temperature of surface water there changes dramatically.
Scientists want to know why that is, especially because these temperature shifts affect the weather. New research suggests that human activity is part of the cause.
Scientists originally thought that maybe some mysterious pattern in deep-ocean currents, such as an invisible hand stirring a giant bathtub, created this temperature see-saw.
And that may be part of it. But there's a new idea: The cause isn't in the water; it's above it — a kind of air pollution called aerosols.
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Ocean Energy

REEDSPORT — A wave energy company that plans to build a 30-acre ocean energy power station off Reedsport has received a green light from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Last week, FERC granted Ocean Power Technologies the first license for a wave power station in the United States. If completed, OPT’s 10-buoy park will be the first... [Read more of this review]

From Ocean Place Resort and Spa:
Lime Energy Co. announced this month that Ocean Place has signed a partnering agreement under the NJ Clean Energy’s Pay for Performance (P4P) to help identify and implement energy reduction and conservation measures to help reduce the resort’s consumption by a minimum of 15 percent. Consisting of 254 guest rooms... [Read more of this review]

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) have discovered a third form of energy that powers the likes of certain mussels, shrimp, and worms found in the surroundings of hydrothermal vents. Earlier discoveries of chemosynthesis at the vents included sulfur oxidation... [Read more of this review]

Philippine Daily Inquirer
The Department of Energy (DoE) expects the Philippines’ first ocean energy facility to start commercial operations by 2018.
Data from the National Renewable Energy Plan book showed that the first project to go into operation will be the 10-megawatt Cabangan ocean energy thermal conversion (Otec) project in Zambales.
The... [Read more of this review]